Time is one commodity no business can afford to waste. In their efforts to conserve time, businesses have turned more and more to machines. As machines have become increasingly advanced technologically, their usefulness to businesses have increased. As the march of progress has continued, single machines now handle multiple tasks. These so-called “Multi functional peripherals” (MFPs), are capable of accomplishing multiple tasks such as printing, copying, and the like. A business with several MFPs may network them for greater efficiency.
Nonetheless, even networked machines, including MFPs, do not ensure that a business will be able to process jobs as quickly as possible. One difficulty encountered is that machines that are busy may not process new jobs. This results in a “stack” or a “job queue” of pending jobs for busy machines.
One prior art “solution” is for a business person to access the network and attempt to determine which machine(s) may be idle and available for processing jobs. Here, the solution is sometimes worse than the problem in that the time spent searching is greater than the time required to just wait for the job to come up in its normal course. Additionally, not all business people are skilled in manipulating networked machines.
Thus, there is a need in the art for providing an apparatus and method that enables a user to enhance the speed of processing a job by means of a group of networked machines.